


to love something you can not tame

by wanderlustlover



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Game: Mask or Menace, Gen, Jamjar Hijinks, Multi, Roleplay Crossover, wibbly wobbly timey wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:21:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29067231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: The one thing people forget about Padme until they realize and then can never forget it at all because every lack of a tell is suddenly a tell is how astute she is.
Relationships: Padmé Amidala & Ben Solo, Padmé Amidala & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Padmé Amidala & Kylo Ren, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Kudos: 5





	to love something you can not tame

The one thing people forget about Padme until they realize and then can never forget it at all because every lack of a tell is suddenly a tell is how astute she is. The absolution of her canniness among the highest skills that appointed her the youngest monarch in untold time, and the first one to take them to war, to give them a defensive stance of planet protection in thousands of years, even at the age of fourteen.

It's not without small moments, this new friendship she's made (and she thinks it is a friendship, even though she thinks that he would freeze and recoil if the word were placed between; a skimming stone to her, a cracked reactor to him).

That were it only for the expansive height, reliance on black clothes, and general razor-edged movements and words, she thinks she would never have pursued this at the beginning. But there is an intensity to him that she cannot miss rivets to her. Wariness at the edge of those eyes, as though an animal ready to lunge in attack or chew off their own leg to escape all in that same second. Absolution in the confusion of which is the right reaction and everything worse for it.

And deeper, stronger, somehow more intense and more guarded than even all that, a hunger, bleeding pain that lasts only in the most fleeting of seconds. When she catches him staring at her before she'd realized he was at an event. When he suddenly turns toward her sharply, scrutinizing her like she's said something surprising, something perhaps wrong for being right, searching her eyes with a suspicion that borders on brutal and begs this universe to find the lie.

She knows that there is something there. She's too smart not to see it.  
A story she doesn't understand but realized lies somehow between them.  
Like Leia's burning anger and Luke's plaintive, regretful guilt.

She has begun to count these moments,  
grains of sand, drops of water,  
stars in the night sky,

But she hasn't pushed.

(She married Anakin, didn't she?

She knows what it is to love something you can not tame. To never want to. To be grateful for its love, and to withstand the terrorized idea of its loss when the passion of its focus, anger, idealism has drawn it somewhere far, far, far away from your side, for both better and worse.

She knows most of all how to wait.)

She knows something is there, something deep and sharp and angry as it is sad and wounded and desperately hungry.

That there is a pit of sharpened rocks between her and it, between it and him. But that he's still sitting on that other edge. By choosing to stand next to her, continuing to have conversations about art and politics, about families and foreign universes. A game with little reveal where she is certain now every word is one that matters, that is weighed. (That is being kept.)

But she has time. They both have time.  
It's what this place is made of most.


End file.
